Q-Day Is Coming: Post-Quantum Cryptography From Theory to Implementation

This tech talks is sponsored by Maurer-Electronics Split d.o.o. and Digitalna Dalmacija

Our sponsor Maurer-Electronics Split kindly provides pizza and a beverage so that you can enjoy the company of fellow techies during the socializing part of the event.
Thanks to Digitalna Dalmacija for providing the space for this talk.

Quantum computers are no longer science fiction, and neither is the threat they pose to the encryption protecting your applications today. This talk bridges the gap between quantum theory and everyday software engineering, giving you the practical context you need to understand what’s coming and how to prepare.

The event will take place on Wednesday, May 6, from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM CEST at PICS@FESB, R. Boškovića 32, 3rd floor, Split.

We’ll start with a ground-up explanation of how quantum computers actually work — qubits, superposition, entanglement — stripped of the hype and tailored for developers. From there, we’ll see how Shor’s algorithm can tear apart the RSA and elliptic curve cryptography your infrastructure relies on, and why a sufficiently powerful quantum computer makes classical public key cryptography obsolete overnight.

The second half of the talk shifts from threat to response. We’ll walk through the post-quantum algorithms selected by NIST after their multi-year competition, comparing them against their classical counterparts in terms of security model, performance, and practical tradeoffs.

Finally, we’ll get hands-on with ML-KEM — a NIST-selected key encapsulation mechanism — and implement a full key exchange from scratch, so you leave with something concrete you can take back to your codebase.

Whether you’re a backend developer, security engineer, or just someone who ships software that handles sensitive data, this talk will change how you think about the encryption you’re trusting today.